Overwatch Update Coming in June, More to Follow

Finally, we won’t have a mini heart attack when Reaper just appears right next to us.

It looks like our first significant Overwatch update is coming in June, as Blizzard’s principal designer Geoff Goodman has taken to theforums in response to some of the community’s suggestions, and has made a few notes in response to some of the their current concerns.

One of his first notes is regarding revolver-toting marksman McCree, who Goodman believes is a bit overpowered. More specifically, Goodman believes that McCree’s flashbang is a “bit too good at dealing damage to higher health targets such as Tanks and barriers.” He went on to say that he doesn’t have anything set in stone just yet, but he and his team are working on some McCree tweaks to see how to improve, also noting that it would more likely be McCree’s fan the hammer attack that would see a change.

His second note focuses on D.Va, one of the game’s tanking characters. Goodman says, “I do think there is some room for some D.Va improvements, but these are unlikely to take the shape of increasing her damage output significantly…The goal is that she would be a viable aggressive initiation tank much like Winston can be right now, rather than some sort of beefy flying assassin. So, any changes will likely be helping her in that direction.”

Finally, as far as Overwatch character changes are concerned, game director Jeff Kaplan made some comments about Reaper and his teleportation effect, which in its current state, doesn’t differentiate in color dependent on the team he’s on (as other characters’s abilities do). So, there’s no way to tell if the character is friend or foe when he randomly appears next to you. He went on to say that a fix has already been completed internally, and it will release in mid to late June.

But it’s not only the game’s characters that will soon see updates, as Kaplan notes that the Overwatch team is working on some tweaks to the game’s Highlights feature, which in its current state, archives up to five clips of your recent best plays and allows you to export using the console’s sharing options or third-party software. Kaplan says the goal is to allow players to save their highlights and export them to a video format “someday.”

And finally, lead software designer Rowan Hamilton told GameSpot that they’re constantly looking at ways to improve the Play of the Game highlights, as they’re not satisfied with how the computer figures out what’s cool. He says that “it’s going to be an ongoing process and hopefully we continue to improve it.” Hamilton says that they basically over-corrected the computation from the testing phase, as Zenyatta, a support character, frequently won the play of the game with her massive amount of healing.

It’s good to see the Overwatch development team take a proactive approach, and although I’m typically against nerfing a game, some of the characters do need some minor tweaking. It sounds like the only update confirmed to be coming soon is Reaper’s teleportation effect as well as the previously confirmed Ranked Mode, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard included a breadth of changes along with it and gave Update 1 a name of some sort.

Do you want to see these Overwatch updates implemented? Sound off in the comments below with your suggested tweaks.